Colin Rigby

Biography

I have extensive practical experience of production management, consultation and engineering based project work across a number of sectors of the ceramics industry. Before starting my career in engineering, I completed my MSc and Mphil at Manchester University and a BSc at UMIST in engineering-based disciplines.

Research and scholarship

My research activity is now focused in several areas concerned with developing a critical perspective on processes of individual, organisational and societal change.

• My research on agility explores so called contemporary or “post industrial” forms of operation management and organisation is being pursued in a number of prestigious UK organisations, commenting in particular on its effects upon the working lives of managers and workers. While most of the existing literature view agility as an operational, technical issue, this research demonstrates that agility is a complex and contested social and political phenomenon, which acquires its meanings via subtle processes of inter-subjective communication in which ambiguity and power configuration play a substantial role.
• My work on processes of economic and social transformation in the Stoke-on-Trent ceramics industry explores the effects of current economic and social changes on the experiences of senior managers and workers and the drive to diversify an historically constrained industry (SRB6), new entrepreneurs (TE3 Project), as well as the responses of various organisations to the orthodoxy of the demands of change and transition.
• One of the fundamental issues abundant in the literature on change management is that of concept of resistance. Although ubiquitous it receives relatively little attention apart from its acceptance as part of operational difficulties. The research serves to rebalance this issue by taking an identity-based perspective and examining the claim that change affects a person’s notion of their identity.
• Research into forms of “in-work” industrially based methodologies and related debates in multi-paradigm research concerned with researcher identity, interplay of practice and theory and ideas of knowledge and truth in organisation studies.